Bumper Crop Of Depression For Farmers

May 8, 1986|By Susan Veatch, Editorial Research Reports

CRAWFORDSVILLE, IND. — They looked more like patients at a dentist's office than people waiting to sign up for money from the government, the men and women sitting in the Montgomery County agriculture office.

They were real farmers, whose plight has been publicized by everyone from Washington columnists to country-Western singers. They were the survivors, the ones who didn't lose the old farm -- or, at least, hadn't lost it yet. On this day they were waiting to enroll in the feed grain program.

It essentially pays farmers for not doing what American farmers do so well -- growing crops. The U.S. Department of Agriculture guarantees a price for what they presumably would have made if they hadn't let the land stand idle. There was a lot of talk beside pickup trucks in the barn lots and at grain elevators, the farmers' meeting places, about what they simply call ''the program.'' The rules were changed this year and were so late in coming that the original sign-up deadline had to be extended.

The consensus was that anyone would be a fool not to join in. No outlays for seed and fertilizer and chemicals, for one thing. You couldn't lose. Of course, you might not gain much either, not if Gramm-Rudman-Hollings lopped 4 percent off the top of your payments.

Farming is an annual cycle of hedging bets -- against sun, rain, hail, market prices and weeds. Add Gramm-Rudman-Hollings to the list and you know why the grim looks on the farmers' faces were broken only by black humor.

In one chair sat a strapping man of about 30, with the ever-present cap on his head, lace-up boots on his big feet. A heavy-set mother chewed nervously on the inside of her lip as she explained that she had left her two toddlers at home with their grandmother. She had sat waiting for an hour and a half in the same office earlier in the week and the children had become so restless she left before her turn.

Not far away, a farmer old enough to be their father was asking the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service employees to explain ''the program'' to him. There was confusion in his voice and impatience in theirs. But the employees' eyes were compassionate. They understood that the old man had taken up this life as a boy, when farmers earned their money by the sweat of their brow, not by signing a form written by bureaucrats.

Then Charlie came in, livening up the waiting room. Charlie allowed as how he had tried to beat the system by showing up on a sunny day, when he figured other farmers would be out plowing. No such luck. He waited, joking, explaining ''the program'' as he understood it, describing his second job at the gas station, the one he had taken to subsidize his farming.

Finally, even Charlie got quiet. He shifted his feet a few more times, then announced, ''I'm not going to stand around here any longer. Hell, we're not going to get part of that money till next spring anyhow.'' He shrugged. ''By then it will be too late for me.''